Some pictures of my mother

These are photographs of my mother, taken over a few years in the place where she lived. I’m sending them because they are the easiest way I know to show what makes a photograph work on a website, and none of them took any skill or any equipment. Every one was taken on a phone.

There’s no rush on any of this, and nothing here is a standard to live up to. It’s just what I reach for when I’m trying to explain what I mean.

My mother seated in the middle with a young man in a black cap leaning in on one side and me on the other, all three of us smiling, a framed painting of flowers on the wall behind.
Three of us, close enough that you can see everyone’s face. Two or three people fill a picture. A whole room full of people usually doesn’t.
My mother and me sitting shoulder to shoulder in front of a tall window, green trees filling the glass behind us.
We sat by a window. That is the whole trick — window light does more for a photograph than anything else you can control indoors.
My mother at a table with a green pen, filling in a newspaper crossword and looking down at the page.
Mum working the crossword. She isn’t looking at the camera and it doesn’t matter. Somebody absorbed in something they enjoy is the picture.
A woman with long fair hair leaning in from behind my mother’s shoulder with both arms around her, the two of them smiling together in a plain room.
Somebody who loves her, with her arms around her. The room behind them is plain and nobody notices, because that isn’t what you’re looking at.
My mother outdoors in bright sunshine in her wheelchair, a yellow flowering shrub beside her and a rose bush against a brick wall behind.
Outside on a good day. Her wheelchair is right there in the frame and it doesn’t hurt the picture at all — she is the subject, not the chair.
My mother in profile outdoors in low sun, looking away to one side, with a tree in deep red autumn leaf and blue sky behind her.
Late afternoon, colour in the tree behind her. She’s looking off to the side, not at me. Not every picture needs eye contact.
A close arm’s-length photograph of my mother and me outdoors in a courtyard, both of us smiling, a brick building and a cloudy sky behind.
Me holding the phone out at arm’s length in the courtyard. Nothing more complicated than that.
My mother in her wheelchair across a dim salon room with a stylist in green scrubs sitting beside her, photographed from the doorway, with furniture and floor filling the front of the frame.
Getting her hair done, which I love as a memory. But I took it from the doorway instead of walking over, and the room was dim. It’s the one here I’d struggle to use on a website — same day, same phone, four steps further away.

The last one is here on purpose. I love it as a memory and I’d struggle to use it on a website, and the difference between it and the others is not the camera. It’s that I stayed in the doorway. Walking four steps closer, in a brighter room, is most of what separates a photograph you can use from one you can’t.

One more thing worth knowing, and it applies to these very pictures. Every photograph on this page came off Facebook rather than off the phone that took it, and Facebook shrinks a picture and softens it on the way through. That’s why these look a little fuzzy up close. The originals are still sitting on somebody’s phone, and they’re two or three times better.

So if there’s one thing to take from this page: send the picture straight off the phone that took it.